Dawn broke with early summer’s golden glow in the Philadelphia suburb where we lived in a house owned by our corporation, Waldrup Enterprises, Inc. A long day spread before us. I set the alarm for 6:30. We had another half hour. Time enough, I thought.

The faint morning light coming through the window of our room illuminated the creamy tan curve of Sam’s face and shoulder. Sliding my hand across the sheets I found her breast. A couple of rubs and the nipple became pebble hard. She sighed and turned toward me with a drowsy smile. “We’ll have to be quick,” she murmured and pressed her body firmly against mine.

Without another word or thought, our mouths came together in a lingering kiss. Sam’s hands probed below the covers, feeling for the ardent, erect shaft hidden in the shadows. I went through one of those fits where I wanted to touch, lick, and penetrate everything she had with every sense at once. The event’s psychedelic. Think of hearing an electric banana or tasting a Beatles medley.

I settled for tracing the outline of her pelvis.

“You devil,” she whispered with a throaty, passion-besotted sigh, “you know I can’t take much of that.” She rose up on an elbow and the sheets slid away, revealing the creamy, compact little body I loved for all of my life—at least for all of it that meant anything.

She rolled me so I lay face up and climbed on top. I felt the manipulations of her small, strong hands as she positioned herself for penetration. Reaching up, I took her rock-hard butt cheeks in each hand and separated them as much as possible without causing pain. I knew exactly how far I could go. Sam accepted me inside of her with a languid sigh.

She took in a deep, rasping breath with each upstroke, keeping rigidly upright above the waist. The gathering morning light outlined a pair of tan mounds capped by hard pink nipple.

I thought of what she felt like inside. The wonderful warmth of her vagina had a way of caressing and pulling me at the same time. Tiny hands pressed down on my chest as climax approached. I almost couldn’t breathe. We came together in a dazzle of contraction and ejection.

* * * *

“Look Mom!” cried Eddie as the jetliner banked, filling the window with blazing light and a blue hemisphere of the Bay of Biscay. We prepared to land in Bilbao.

Sam, sitting between Eddie and me, leaned toward the oval portal. “It’s beautiful, honey.” The sunlight lit her red hair with golden highlights. I sneaked a look at her from the back, the straight shoulders tapering to a narrow waist ending in the delicious curve of hip and butt. After seven years together, her taut body thrilled me as if I were seeing it for the first time.

I couldn’t wait to get her alone again.

“What’s beautiful, Mommy?” asked Cassandra, pulling me back to the present. Cassie, Eddie, and Claire were our triplets. The two girls sat with Bertie, the nanny, in the next row behind. Claire read a book of fairy tales while Cassie’s face, a miniature of Sam’s, remained glued to the window.

“The sea, love,” Bertie said with a high-pitched London east end accent. “See how beautiful the water is?”

The Bilbao skyline filled the window as the airplane banked away from the aquamarine seascape. Sam grabbed my sleeve, rolled her eyes, and whispered, “I’m so hungry.”

Some of us brought food when traveling but seeing the rarity of the cut offended the sensitivities of most human passengers and garnered unwanted attention, so we avoided eating in public. The children and Bertie were a different story. Bertie was a human familiar and the kids ate everything in sight.

In every other way, too, they developed more like human children than any pre-emergent of our kind. From the instant my former nanny Carole Henson pointed out baby Eddie’s alertness compared to mine at the same age, Sam and I understood the children would be different. In what ways only time would tell. Sam, as a lycan, and I, as a vampire, didn’t walk until the age of three. We said our first words when our contemporaries started school. Eddie, Claire, and Cassie walked at nine months. Having just turned six, all of them read at a second grade level. Subsequent offspring born from lycan-vampire unions, numbering fourteen now, showed the same pattern.

We deplaned and traveled down the long corridor past the gates to the security checkpoint and customs. In the public area, the arm of a tall, drop dead gorgeous woman with jet black hair and porcelain white skin shot into the air and began waving frantically when she caught sight of us. Cynthia was a lycan. Sam had been her mentor and together we helped her through Emergence. Since then, she became part of the family and the children called her Aunt Cynthia.

The sea of faces and their various meager personal aromas parted somewhat and Cynthia stood alone. When Sam and I met, except for a faint personal scent akin to cinnamon, I couldn’t tell her from a human. In thirteen decades, I’d run across the curious trace maybe three times, an anonymous essence momentarily sensed before dissolving into the mainstream of human smells. The rarity of such encounters contributed to the reason lycans and vampires were unaware of one another’s existence. For two thousand years, until Sam and I found one another, each kind believed the other to be a myth.

An involuntary tremble coursed through my son’s hand, nestled in mine. “It’s Aunt Cynthia.” His tone conveyed both love and reverence for the stiletto heeled magnificence, standing well over six feet tall.

Sam nudged me. “She’s come a long way since the sassy anorexic teen from the support group.” Once a pasty-skinned clumsy girl with the body of a child, emergence transformed her into the alabaster-skinned Fashion Model Known as Cynthia.